However, unlike a lot of scenarios like this, Grant has left us with a somewhat longer window before we have to act, which does several interesting things.

First, it creates a sense of looming dread that we’re going to have to live with for a while. Incidentally, Grant seems fond of this – we agreed to an unspecified favor for a water fey earlier in the game and that won’t be coming due any time soon; we’re about two months in the world’s time into the game, which means we have about 10 more months until that favor comes due. The saving of the newborn is going to have to happen at least 2-3 months before that, however, which gives us both time to prepare and time for the situation to get more complicated. There’s also the near certainty that the party is currently no match for Auntie Bloat. Which means we need to gain some levels. Plural. Fast.

Second, speaking of getting more complicated, it’s pushing us to solidify alliances we’ve started forming. The party has sought the aid of Rishi, a Kenku sorcerer and the first friendly NPC we met on the island that didn’t also arrive on our ship. But in order to get that aid, we have to help him secure another teacher for his apprentice should he die in the effort, which means we’re going to be traveling to another nearby island (or perhaps several) in the archipelago on a just-salvaged boat we recovered from some gnolls that had been eaten by giant spiders.

Finally, it’s acting as a mechanism to tie several plot threads together. As mentioned in previous blog posts, the party has been building relationships and a reputation as folks useful to the colony (and to a lesser extent, the Kenku), and as such has been able to call in some favors. The boat itself is a massive favor that Governor Hester Warwick has granted us because while the party is so often the bearer of news of new complications that she gets a headache every time we report in, we’ve also gotten results every time she’s sent us to do something. Rishi is willing to help us because we’ve helped him and the Kenku in a big way once already (in fact, he was the one who sent us to steal the item from Auntie Bloat in the first place). And the colony is starting to expand to the point where the target painted on us for various threats to zero in on is getting bigger and more brightly-colored.

This long-term approach does have a single significant drawback, however: it’s far enough out, there’s a certain risk of losing the sense of dread, and on the other side of the coin there’s also a chance (as killed the Shadowrun game) that the players will become paralyzed with second-guessing and not go anywhere. Do that long enough and even a very good campaign can die.

Still, I think there’s a lot of value in taking this longer view. In a previous campaign of mine, a generally very successful one, we sat down at the end and realized that the player characters had started at level 5 and had wound up at level 21 less than six months of game time later. Their journey had been a constant charge through an unending chain of immediate threats and un-ignorable emergencies. They’d had no time to breathe at all; in the real world, even hardened combat verterans couldn’t keep up the pace they’d kept up, and in retrospect, that had been poor storytelling on my part.

So I think there’s some real value in placing a problem that’s certain and scary on the horizon and letting the players get to it over a longer period of time rather than dropping it on top of them and forcing them to react NOW like so many GMs, including me, have done.

As usual, I’d love to hear your comments on this topic. How have you and your gaming group paced your threats, and how did it work out?

This week’s image is used, unaltered, under creative commons and comes from Schizoform.

Threats without horror

A lot of the time when GMs are running fantasy games, there is an all-too-seductive temptation to lean heavily on supernatural or horrific cruelty to create a sense of stakes in the game, impressing on the players how important their mission is with demons, undead, or mangled remains of innocent victims almost from the jump. While this can be effective in certain games, it is an overused trope, so it’s been refreshing that Grant has used supernatural horror elements very sparingly and has instead focused mostly on natural threats. The first encounter of the game was with sahuagin, who basically act like a nasty school of predatory fish – they attacked and dragged prey into the water, but didn’t curse people with foul magic or ritually sacrifice them on the beach. The biggest, nastiest threat currently on the island (at least, that we know of) is a wyvern, which is a massive, venomous beast, but isn’t demonic or evil – just big and hungry. There have been some supernatural threats sprinkled in – a spectral undead and what we think is probably a hag – but for the most part, the difficulties and adversaries we’ve faced have been very grounded – taking care of the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and trying to establish good relationships with the other people we’ve met on the island – the kenku.

It’s not all about alignment

Speaking of the kenku, one of the things I find cool about the game is that I have no idea what alignment Rishi is. I am similarly ignorant about the colony governor, Hester Warwick, and in fact about every single other character in the entire game except the other two player characters, whose alignments I know through metagame knowlege only. In addition, there is literally no way for Lambert to find out, despite the fact that he’s a cleric, because the “Detect Evil and Good” spell now simply alerts you to the presence of supernatural entities or magically consecrated or desecrated areas rather than letting you see where every sapient creature around you falls on a 3×3 alignment bingo card if you cast it enough times. That means that, in the game as in life, we have to figure out who is trustworthy and who isn’t by observing behavior and interacting with characters rather than simply scanning them. This is a change in the D&D system proper from previous editions rather than something Grant is explicitly doing, but after playing a number of sessions with it in place, I can say without reservation that I think that was an exceptionally good design decision.

Things that are interesting without being epic

The kenku look like walking, wingless crows, but they also have aspects of lyrebirds in that they can mimic all sorts of sounds around them and even pass these sounds down to descendants, which is why the party can communicate with them at all. The old mystery cult monastery we cleared out as our first dungeon was full of implied story and interesting bits of world history, but there was nothing world-shattering in there, just an old building that had some history.

The desire to make things epic or jaw-dropping is another pitfall a lot of campaigns can fall into, and having a world that is interesting and feels grounded and lived-in has helped me to stay interested and engaged in the game. It seems to be pushing our group to actually live in the world a lot as well – there has been a lot more focus and a lot more in-character time in this campaign than anything we’ve done since the Shadowrun game.

Limited violence

There has been combat, certainly, but the entire game is not a string of fights connected with flimsy plot. Some of the best moments in the game have been role playing ones, and that has been consistent. Grant has done an admirable job of keeping the challenges of setting up a society and interacting with a new one front and center, and I will admit that I (and my PC) have much more anxiety about the colonists going all conquistador on the kenku than I do about the monsters on the island.

Grant would probably ask me to balance this out with criticism, but I honestly don’t have any, and in any case he has done so in his own posts already. So there.

Personal Goals

One of the things I’ve been trying to work on is my tendency to hog the spotlight. Fortunately, the other players made deeper and more complex characters than I did, so they’ve actually been helping with that quite a bit just by being awesome. Lambert is a very busy PC, but he is certainly not the toughest member of the party (that is unquestionably Garm, especially now that he’s gotten access to some magic) and he’s not the most skillful or intelligent member either (that would be Aster, the unbelievably competent rogue).

I am also trying to use this game to practice what we preach on the show. Lambert is a very deliberate attempt at breaking away from some of the more violent and self-righteous characters I’ve played in the past. What I’ve been trying to do with him is make him into “glue.” While he’s not a pacifist, I want him to be a peacemaker, and I also want his influence to be at least one reason why the members of the colony live in harmony with the natives of the island rather than conquering or disregarding them. Lambert was designed to be the kind of person who doesn’t get a lot of recognition, but helps society be better, more empathetic, and more compassionate, hopefully due to his example. I want to use him to practice humility, charity, and kindness rather than just righteous fury and decisiveness. I want him to help the other PCs become the epic, noble heroes they can clearly become. And most importantly, I am hoping that his story will point toward the life that really is life, that he will be a good example of how to be authentically human and a servant of God (despite the fact that he’s in a polytheistic setting and a cleric of a member of the pantheon therin). Time will tell how successful I am in that.

(A personal note: This blog post was supposed to go up last Friday. However, between a nasty head cold and some other issues, that didn’t happen. I apologize for not getting this out in a timely manner.)

Session 6

I’m going to try something a little different for this post. Since these two sessions were pretty action-packed, I’m going to recap each session and then immediately talk about it from a GM’s perspective, rather than packing all the GM notes at the bottom.

Recap

I left the party on a cliffhanger: Rishi (the wacky old kenku loremaster) was juuuuust about to tell the party something they could do to earn the trust of Kondou (head of the kenku village) and the other kenku. (I’m going to talk about that cliffhanger in the “GM’s Notes” section below.) Well, Rishi’s task was simple, on the face of it. He wanted them to retrieve a stone tablet, about 8″x12″x1″, with a kenku carved into it. It had “gone missing”, he said, and he’d just learned where it went: It was in Auntie Bloat’s house.

“Auntie Bloat”, it turned out, was an ancient kenku witch—much older even than Rishi—who lurked in a bog at the far western end of the island, living in a fish’s skull. She and Rishi apparently were in a bit of a standoff, and the PCs offered the opportunity to shake things up. So the next morning—after waking up to the sound of Rishi shouting a story off his balcony to passing kenku—the party set off to find Auntie Bloat.

The kenku village was just a bit uphill of the small lake the party had spotted the day before, and the witch’s swamp was (naturally) at the end of the small river flowing out of that lake. Finding her was therefore just a matter of traveling down-river. This occasioned an interesting debate, however: Aster (the scrappy, urban rogue with a … limited … grasp of the concept of personal property) was strongly in favor of taking a fishing boat, even if there wasn’t anyone around to ask about that. (Her player—my wife—invoked her “It’s not stealing if I need it more” flaw, and earned an Inspiration point for doing so.) The party argued this for a bit, and eventually nixed the idea on both moral and practical grounds, but it was a good (and 100% player-created) moment.

The trip down-river was uneventful, and generally skipped over aside from a general geographic description. However, I did make sure to describe a point—which the party reached right about sundown—where the terrain rather suddenly and drastically changed. The players could practically see a line in the trees where things went crooked and dark, and the trees became twisted.

A little further in, while it was still twilight, the party found what appeared to be an old campground. Aster decided to scout ahead while the other two set up camp. This turned out to be a mistake—as soon as Aster was out of sight, two twig blights and two needle blights ambushed Lambert (the cleric) and Garm (the fighter). Thankfully, Aster circled back quickly and, well-hidden by the darkness, started laying waste as only a rogue with advantage on all her rolls can. The party took practically no damage in this fight, and Aster wrapped it up by using the lamp oil in her kit to light the needle blights on fire (and managed to stay hidden in the process thanks to some great rolls.)

The fight did cause the party to proceed more carefully, however, and that let them discover and avoid the dangers of a stretch of quicksand I’d put into the swamp. Just at the point where they could see and hear the ocean through the trees—about a mile away from where they’d entered—they found one last feature of the swamp: An arc of scarecrows, set in a line around the mouth of the river. These would feature prominently in the next session! About this time, I started adding more sensory detail: A stench of rotten fish and seaweed, a slick slime on everything, and so forth. I did my best to convey rot and decay, and specifically the sort you find at the ocean.

Finally, the party spotted the witch’s house, and it definitely shocked the players and characters alike. Rishi had warned them that Auntie Bloat lived in “a fish skull”, but the two-story tall, jagged, prehistoric skull of a deep-sea horror was certainly unexpected. The bone stairs leading up a glistening, sickly-white hill standing on a rocky outcropping jutting out into the sea; the flickering light leaking out of the skull-house’s gaping eyes and between its clenched teeth; the slime and rot coating everything—all of it worked to put a genuine scare into the party, and that reveal ended up being a great moment for everyone.

As they watched from their hiding-place, the moon began to rise over the ocean. At that moment, the jaw-door creaked open and a hunched, kenku-shaped shadow lurched down the stairs, turning at the bottom and walking straight into the ocean. Looks like they’d arrived just in time…

GM’s Notes

Given my errors last time, I was trying very hard to let the players take the lead in this session. I think I was successful in that, at least.

It took me two solid weeks to come up with whatever Rishi was going to ask the party to do. I’m really glad one of our players canceled on us, because I desperately needed that time. I knew I was going to introduce “Auntie Bloat” sometime soon, but I wasn’t sure what Rishi could ask of the party that he (a) couldn’t do himself, and (b) would make sense in this setting. I ended up paging through the Dungeon Master’s Guide the night before the game looking for a macguffin, and finally spotted sending stones. Those solved a lot of problems: One of the pair would be worthless to the players (but important to the kenku); it’d be something Auntie Bloat would happily trade for just to spite Rishi and hurt the kenku; and it served an important role in the setting (which you’ll read about next.) Tough one!

One thing my wife called me out on after this session: Distances. I’ve been deliberately vague with distances, since I’m not good at drawing terrain maps and I just don’t have every feature of this island sorted out in my head yet. I’ve tried to describe distances as “a day’s travel” or “about an hour away” or the like, and that’s worked. However, apparently I’m not doing that consistently, and that makes it harder for everyone to understand where they’re going, what they’re experiencing in-character, etc., and thus what to do. Something to work on.

Not much to say about the fight with needle blights and twig blights, except that the players definitely thought it set the tone for the “evil swamp” area nicely. It wasn’t designed to be especially hard, and there were a few fun, creative moments, so that went well.

Auntie Bloat’s house was the highlight of this session. It was creepy, the scene description involved multiple senses, and there was a real sense of wonder—”what do you mean, a two story tall fish skull?!”—mixed with danger. We wrapped up with a real sense of anticipation for the next session, and I need to try to do that more.

Session 7

Right—back to our story!

Recap

With the witch apparently gone, the party now had to figure out how to get into the witch’s house. Fortunately, Aster (experienced thief that she is) had little trouble climbing the bone plate wall of the witch’s house, especially with a boost from Garm. She peeked through the knuckle-bone curtains (another ‘eww’ moment for the players) and determined that the upstairs of the house seemed empty. Once again the immovable rod came in handy, anchoring a length of rope for the rest of the party to climb up. (Aster smartly coiled up the rope and laid it on the ledge inside, so it wouldn’t show from the outside.) Then the party crept into the witch’s hut and began searching for the tablet.

The upstairs was disturbing, but distinctly lacking in carved tablets. A stove with a cauldron; a table with various foul ingredients for concoctions spread out over it; a blood-stained stone block and ritual knife; a few bookshelves (with books in some sort of unreadable language that hurt the eye); and various trophies, ranging from surprisingly mundane to surprisingly gory, filled the driftwood floor. (A stuffed sahuagin head stood out among these trophies.) A rickety staircase led downward to a cellar filled with mud, bloody cages, barrels of rotting fish and other sea life, crates of collected items, drawers full of junk and detritus—a grotesque mockery of a normal, junk-filled basement or attic. A search here turned up a few items: Potions, a Quall’s feather token (anchor), a few gems and a fair amount of gold squirreled away in various places, a pair of magic arrows (which Aster discovered and immediately squirreled away without telling the party), and, at the bottom of a particularly foul barrel, the tablet Rishi had sent them after.

Right as they turned to leave, however, a shrill, buzzing voice whined “I’m telling…!”

A pair of mud mephits, indistinguishable from the mud around them until they moved, began complaining that they’d seen everything and were going to tell the witch about the party. (I made sure to use whiny, dissatisfied, childish voices for them, which quickly turned the whole situation comical.) They were avaricious, beggarly little creatures, and obviously not a combat threat to the party—but they also couldn’t be permitted to tell Auntie Bloat who’d been there, or that she’d been robbed. Aster bribed them with seven gold coins apiece—from the witch’s own stashes of gold, no less—and they greedily accepted, stashing the gold away in a rafter and a rat’s nest. Then they fell to squabbling about who had more gold, at which point the party left.

Two other actions, in no particular order. First, Lambert (who is proficient in the Herbalism skill, and a neutral good cleric to boot) took a few minutes to ruin as many of Auntie Bloat’s potions and poisons as he could without just smashing up the place. Second, Aster searched about until she found a musical instrument—an ocarina, as it happened—and stole it. Her player refused to explain why she’d done this until later, when she handed it to Garm without a word. (Garm, you may recall, is a gifted but very shy and secretive musician.) That ended up being a clever little roleplaying aside, and was met with broad approval.

The party left the way they’d come, taking their rope and immovable rod down as they left and hoping to slip out undetected. Unfortunately, something had apparently noticed them. Remember that arc of scarecrows I’d described before? All facing out, away from the witch’s house, as if keeping an eye out? That ring had turned inward, looking at them.

This completely freaked the players out. They froze in hiding, debating what to do for a while, before Aster (with another amazing Stealth roll) slipped up behind one of the scarecrows and checked it out. It wasn’t moving, though I made sure to describe it in such a way that it was clear it could move—it wasn’t just clothes on a pole. Then Aster had the bright idea to blindfold that scarecrow with a strip of something.

The moment when the scarecrow reached up and pulled the blindfold off might have been the highlight of the night. Everyone flipped out—in character and out of character—and panicked. The resulting fight with two scarecrows was very tough (I’ll talk more about it below), and Aster ended up using both of those magical arrows she’d found (+2 arrows, as it turned out) while Garm and Lambert both nearly went down. Scarecrows take half damage from non-magical weapons, and their fear and paralysis abilities really hampered everyone’s ability to put out damage. Lambert’s bless spell saved the day, helping Garm and Aster hit more consistently (Garm’s player was rolling very badly) and providing a big boost on saving throws against those status effects. After six long rounds of combat, the party barely scraped by with a few hitpoints apiece and extra kindling.

After that, the party did their best to move carefully through the swamp, keeping an eye out for more dangers (and thus avoiding quicksand on the way back.) Once they were clear of the swamp, though, they made all possible speed back upriver towards the kenku village. They arrived near dawn, exhausted, filthy, hungry, and successful.

Rishi was delighted, of course, and revealed what the tablet was: Half of a pair of sending stones. The other half was kept in another kenku village on a distant island, and was their only regular means of communicating with them. Rishi had “lost” it (implying he’d traded it away to Auntie Bloat, either foolishly, or as a very dear price for something else he’d needed more at the time) nearly twenty years ago, and the village had been unable to communicate with its counterpart since then. Naturally, when the party woke up that evening the kenku were celebrating the tablet’s return, and Kondou agreed that this service was proof of the party’s friendship with the kenku. He asked that the party take word to the colony that the kenku would deal with them as friends, and added only one condition—that his son’s bones be returned from the old monastery the colony had settled in.

The next morning, the party traveled back to the colony, where they were debriefed by Governor Warwick and one of the colony’s other Council members, a bookish gnome named Bas Holst. The latter wondered if Auntie Bloat might not have been a hag—a twisted sort of fey creature—and Lambert determined to ask the naiad in the monastery about that. The Governor ordered that news of the kenku and the witch (or hag, if she was indeed a hag) be kept secret, but that everyone be warned about the wyvern. She also told the party that a small group of lumberjacks, who had gone a bit far afield of the colony on the northern shore, had been ambushed by sahuagin storming up out of the waves. Two were dead, and two more hurt. Lambert rushed off to tend to the injured colonists, while Garm and Aster sought out dinner—and that’s where we wrapped up.

The party hit level 3 at the end of this session. Aster officially took the ‘Thief’ sub-class; and Garm took the “Eldritch Knight” subclass (which I’ll talk about a lot in my next post, since the next session ended up being a lot of roleplay involving that choice.)

GM’s Notes

The whole time the party was in Auntie Bloat’s domain, in or near her house, I did my best to play up the gore and horror of the area. My group doesn’t have much problem with that, but the rather wanton use of it definitely played up the grotesque Black Forest / Slavic fairy-tale witch vibe I wanted. (As it happens, it’s also the sort of thing hags do, according to the Monster Manual.) Lovecraftian horror permeates our group at times, and this was actually sort of a refreshing change.

The encounter with the mud mephits went very well. It definitely wasn’t a combat encounter—though if the player characters had waited around to ambush Auntie Bloat when she returned, the mud mephits would’ve been part of a rather complex combat I had in my back pocket. Without that, though, the mephits posed an odd sort of question: What do you do when evil isn’t gloating or nefarious, but rather whiny and childish? It was fun, it set the tone a bit and introduced mephits into the setting (which I’ve only otherwise encountered, in any form, through Bioware’s D&D computer games!) The party’s solution was also fine.

Aster’s little moment, where she snagged a musical instrument, is part of a complex and evolving relationship she and Garm have. Aster technically owns Garm and can (and does) order him about. She’s also very curious about him, and wants him to be a relatively normal person instead of the emotionally-stunted killing machine the arena turned him into. Silently giving him that ocarina was a signal that (a) despite Garm’s best efforts, Aster knew about his musical talent; (b) it was totally fine with her; and (c) she was going to keep it secret from everyone else, at least for the time being. Lots of subtext in a single action—and excellent roleplaying.

I need to talk about, and apologize to my players for, the scarecrow encounter. Turns out two CR 2 monsters is a really tough fight for three second-level PCs, especially when they take half damage from almost everything! I didn’t do the encounter math ahead of time; if I had, this wouldn’t have been nearly so hard a fight. Having said that, though, this was also the only time I think the party has really felt challenged in combat. Since we’re not really doing dungeon crawls much, where long chains of less-difficult encounters can wear a party down, I may have to put more difficult fights in—when appropriate, of course.

And with that, I think I’m done recapping! I’ve got more to write about still—we wrapped up session #8 this past weekend, and it went extremely well. At this rate, I may never catch up with our fast-moving game… how awesome would that be?

Anyways, let’s talk about exploration—and bad GMing.

Recap

For those keeping track at home, I’ve written about three sessions so far. Here’s a recap of the next two.

Session 4

So after exploring the ancient monastery and clearing it out, the various colonists moved in (somewhat) and started settling down in earnest. After a day or two of helping with various chores, the PCs decided to explore and try to find an easy way to the top of the cliffs they had settled in front of. They went south, following the coastline, and found a sizable bay there that might one day be a good harbor, though the current colony location is a bit far away to use it themselves. In the distance, well to the south-south-east, they also spotted a sharp, solitary spire of rock jutting out of the ocean. (The picture I sent them to illustrate this was of Bell’s Pyramid, a pretty amazing natural wonder in the ocean between Australia and New Zealand.)

After about half a day of travel, they eventually found a place where they could get up the cliff face. They found a sub-tropical forest at the top, along with a few high places they could get a better view of the inland terrain from. That gave them a glimpse of a bit more geography—a tall, volcanic mountain in the distance, a plateau sloping away from them … and a thin, barely-visible plume of smoke rising in the distance to the west of them, suggesting that someone might live there.

After getting a bearing on that, the PCs traipsed back along the cliffs to a point above the main body of colonists, still gathered around that ancient monastery. They found a few indications that there had been outbuildings of a sort at the clifftop, but everything except the foundations and a few pottery shards was long since gone.

At this point, the party’s creative instinct took over. Using the immovable rod they’d recovered in the previous adventure and some of Aster’s rope, they set up a crude pulley system and pulled one of the thick hawsers from the Brazen—the colonials’ wrecked ship—up to the clifftop. Using this much sturdier rope, they worked to create a relatively safe route up and down the cliff. It would still be a hard climb for most of the colonists, but it would let those who needed it get up and down without significant danger.

Then the PCs reported back to the colonial governor, got permission to go investigate that sign of potential habitation in the morning, and … well, that was it for the session. Not a great session, but I’ll talk more about that below.

Session 5

The party packed up, made a few simple arrangements, climbed up the rope system they’d helped create the previous session, and headed west.

The journey took most of the day, and (not wanting to interrupt too much) I mostly just described the terrain. That was mostly sub-tropical forest, with a few clearings, gently sloping downhill as they moved away from the cliffs along game trails through the forest. I only threw in one stop of any importance: They encountered a very large stone head on its side—clearly ancient, and badly worn away by weather and plant growth, but recognizably humanoid. A bit of searching found what might have been more pieces just barely sticking out of the ground, equally proportioned and suggesting that this statue was massive when it stood upright.

Naturally, the PCs had to climb it, and they eventually did so. (No rush, so I don’t think I made them roll for it. I just said it took a little while.) Even though the statue head sat among trees, it was big enough to provide a vantage point. A thin, glimmering thread of light suggested a stream in the distance eastward—the first surface fresh water the PCs, or any other colonist, had yet found!—and possibly a small lake. Some rolling hills could be seen to the south, and they could see over the water to the north just a little—enough to see a dark shadow on the horizon that might have been another, very remote island. To the northwest stood the mountain they’d spotted the day before—a smooth volcanic cone, not especially tall (certainly not snow-capped) and green about three-quarters of the way up.

Unfortunately, between the party and the mountain flew a wyvern.

The wyvern was certainly not close enough to cause any immediate concern. However, the fact that it was close enough that the party could make it out, and that it was carrying something about the size of a dairy cow, wasn’t exactly comforting either. They watched it carefully as it flapped toward the mountain, until they couldn’t make it out anymore. Then they flipped out for a while. We talked about wyverns for a bit (and traded more images off the internet—Google Image Search has been my constant companion throughout this campaign!) until the players got back on track and continued onward.

As the ground evened out a bit, the forest began to change. It still looked like a natural forest, but fruit trees became more and more abundant, and the ground was a bit clearer—as if it had been tended to. That’s when I sprung the second surprise of the evening: A bent kenku with a staff stepped out in front of them, halting their progress. There was a moment of shocked staring—none of the party having ever even heard of a kenku before—before the elderly kenku spoke to them in a language they didn’t understand. Lambert greeted him in Common and told him they had been washed ashore by the great storm a few days previous, at which point the kenku threw up his hands and danced happily around a tree, shaking his walking stick and shouting (in heavily-accented Common) “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I told them the storm brought change! No one believes Rishi when he says things, but whooo’s the fool now?!”

That was their introduction to Rishi, easily the players’ favorite NPC so far. He spoke a sort of pidgin Common, with plenty of ancient words from other languages thrown in and a great many mimicked sounds as well. (We had to stop to watch this old David Attenborough video about the lyrebird, to give some idea of the level of mimicry involved.)  It was clear enough for the PCs to understand, however. He escorted them to his village, and through it to his house—a low-ceilinged structure built around a large tree, about thirty feet off the ground. The village was a maze of rope bridges, thick branches acting as aerial walkways, houses and other buildings on the ground and in the trees, and a few communal cookfires. The other kenku didn’t seem to speak Common—only the same language Rishi spoke at first, and which the party would eventually learn was Auran. (About this time, Aster picked up on the fact that the bird’s-beak dagger she’d picked up from the monastery might be of kenku make.)

The party ate dinner with Rishi—mostly fruit Rishi had picked as they walked, from what he described as his “garden”—and traded information. Rishi called himself a “Windspeaker”, and apparently fulfilled the role of elderly advisor and lorekeeper in the village. After the sun was down, a stout, young, angry-looking kenku appeared at Rishi’s door and summoned them all to meet with Kondou, the village headman.

Rishi translated what ended up being a fairly unproductive meeting. Kondou wasn’t especially trustful, and figured the arrival of more than a hundred-fifty colonists would be a disaster, but claimed the kenku would weather this storm as they had others before. The angry young kenku—Kondou’s son-in-law Janno—saw the beaked dagger Aster had and snatched it away from her, claiming it had belonged to Kondou’s son. The party told where they’d found it and the circumstances, and Kondou asked them to return his son’s bones to him. Janno voiced suspicions that the PCs, or the colonists in general, had killed him themselves. Beyond that, little was accomplished.

On their way back to Rishi’s house, Rishi casually mentioned that there was something the party could do to earn Kondou’s trust. A little favor for him, and for Rishi, and for the kenku village in general…

GM’s Notes

Looking at the description for these two sessions, the casual reader might be fooled into thinking this was a productive and fun two weeks of gaming. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The feedback I got after Session 5 was straightforward: Stop telling us what’s happening, and let us do things ourselves.

This sort of narrative railroading is a trap I fall into a lot as a GM. It’s occasionally necessary when a party is exploring—it’s important to describe the setting and set the tone, I think, before the players try to do things which don’t fit the environment. In this case, I do feel that I needed to describe a bit more than usual. However, what resulted was two solid sessions of GM setting description and plot narration, and that was definitely too much. I even did this once they had NPCs to interact with! That might’ve been because I was caught up in describing the world, and didn’t notice my ‘cue’ to hand narrative control back to the players; but I suspect it’s just a bad habit of mine. (I pointedly didn’t do as much narration in subsequent sessions, and of course that worked much better.)

That significant criticism aside, there were a few bright spots in these two sessions. Rishi was the breakout NPC. I based him heavily and obviously on The Lion King‘s Rafiki, which I think is fine—he’s not exactly the same, but having a baseline character reference for the players saved a lot of roleplaying effort and established a common ground.

The other big hit was the wyvern. This is unsurprising, and actually something we talked about a lot on our recent episode about epic monsters. The presence of a large, dangerous animal—one which certainly threatens individual colonists and their livelihoods—was rather unnerving. The weirdly normal nature of the wyvern was also a big deal, though. Wyverns aren’t malicious; they’re just large predators, with bad tempers and a taste for livestock (and occasionally farmers.) That was oddly reassuring.

Lastly, I want to talk about the kenku in general. Astute GMs and players who know their Monster Manuals well may be writing angry comments about how the kenku don’t actually speak. That’s true, sort of—according to the 5th Edition Monster Manual (and previous editions’ kenku writeups as well), the kenku understand Common and Auran, and can mimic it very well, but can’t exactly speak it. They can’t make new words, develop a language further themselves, and so forth.

I really liked the kenku as a sort of native people—one of the things I’m developing in the history of this setting is that the “traditional” D&D races don’t exist anymore in this part of the world, and that leaves room for more interesting NPCs like kenku, gnolls, lizardfolk, etc.. However, the language thing was a problem: The mimicry ability of kenku is distinctive, and I wanted to keep it, but I also wanted the player characters to be able to talk to these NPCs. If they only mimicked what they heard, and they hadn’t heard Common, Dwarven, Elven, or any other “normal” D&D language in thousands of years, how would that work? My solution was to let them be capable of normal speech (with Auran as their native tongue), but excellent mimics—so good that their storytellers and lorekeepers could easily pass down most of an ancient form of Common to their students. That neatly handled both the communication problem and my main issue with the kenku as an NPC race. Easy!

So—that was sessions 4 and 5. I’ve got more to talk about, though, because for all that didn’t happen in these two weeks, the last two sessions have been action-packed and player-driven. Stay tuned!

But seriously: Last week, the party wrapped up the first dungeon crawl of the campaign. This was kind of a major milestone for our gaming group, on both sides of the virtual GM’s screen. My wife had never actually explored a proper ‘dungeon’ before, since she’s relatively new to gaming. I’d put maps together for the Savage Shadowrun we played a while back, but those were mostly floor plans I’d filed the serial numbers off and turned into heist scenarios; this was a properly-gridded dungeon, which the players had no foreknowledge of, and that was a first for our group. And for myself, this was a bit of a personal milestone: My previous D&D game was a terrible Eberron game, where I’d focused so heavily on making pretty maps that I completely neglected to put together a coherent plot. So just by virtue of entering a dungeon at all, we were off to a good start.

Good thing, too.

Recap

Monastery on the Shore – Floor 1

As mentioned previously, the shipwrecked and battered colonists had taken refuge at the entrance of a large structure built into the shore-ward cliffs to defend themselves against further sahuagin attacks. I mentioned a few things that the colonists were short on and in immediate need of, making sure to include fresh water in that list for … well, you’ll see why.

The governor—one Baroness Hester Warwick—asked the player characters to explore the structure and make sure there weren’t any nasty surprises lurking inside, behind the colonists. They waited until morning, loaded up on supplies—in particular, Garm (the human fighter) grabbed a sturdy club and Lambert (the human cleric) cast a light spell on it to act as a torch. A few other light spells were cast—it’s a cantrip in 5th Edition, so any party with a cleric should never be hurting for light in a dungeon—and in they went.

The vestibule (A) and long hallway were quite weather-worn, as you’d expect from an ancient structure carved from sandstone next to a hurricane-prone ocean. Few details were gleaned from the long hallway, though some evidence of bas-relief carvings remained and a few nature scenes were legible. Centuries of sand and natural debris, blown up the stairs by storms over time, made the entrance hallways messy, but passable. At the other end of this hallway stood chamber (B), apparently a sort of ‘hub’ for traffic, with a balcony, stairs and several exits.

The players quickly explored the space the northeast of this chamber, revealing it to be an empty store-room devoid of everything except pottery shards. They then went southeast to (D), which turned up a lot of trash, oversized snake pellets (uh-oh), oversized snake skins (uh-oh), and a rather prettily-carved bone bracelet (uh… okay?) which Aster (the half-elven thief) claimed for her own. These rooms appeared to have once been very plain living quarters, with a slab to sleep on—rather like cells. The larger room (C) right at the cliff face, however, had a window and seemed rather nicer, except for the giant poisonous snake. This struck at Aster and knocked her unconscious, but Garm and Lambert quickly dealt with it, and Lambert’s cure wounds put Aster back on her feet immediately.

Naturally, the next step was to dump the giant snake out the window onto the colonists below, which occasioned some comment later and some screaming almost immediately.

Heading back, the party crossed over to (E), where Lambert began to get a vague feeling that he’d been somewhere like this before. Nothing immediately came to mind; but this room, with a raised dais, bookshelves (whose contents had long since rotted away), and stone benches and tables, was the first space that looked reasonably habitable.

Monastery On The Shore – Floor 2

Heading up the stairs north of (E), with Aster (and her darkvision) scouting ahead, the characters noticed a flickering glow around the corner. This turned out to be coming from a number of giant fire beetles living in (F). The party made a bit of noise in the hall, which attracted the fire beetles, and what I’d planned to be a sort of centerpiece fight around rough terrain (along with a nasty surprise) turned into a simple matter of luring beetles into the hallway and dealing with them one or two at a time. Garm and Lambert did most of the work, and Aster eventually snuck into (F), climbed some of the large debris (fallen from the ceiling over time) and picked off the last one with her shortbow. She did trigger that “nasty surprise” I mentioned on her way back, but the violet fungus whiffed its surprise attack and was easily dealt with afterwards. The party was covered with bioluminescent goop, but otherwise completely unharmed!

On examining this largest room (F), Lambert could finally hazard a reasonable guess as to what this complex had once been: A monastery of some sort. The rooms below were for visitors, including a nicer room for an occasional VIP, and the gathering room was potentially something like a chapter house. The damp, fungus-covered room the party currently stood in could have been a refectory; and that supposition was strengthened by the discovery of a kitchen in the next room (G). Attached to that through a narrow hallway was a washroom (H), probably used for hot baths and laundry depending on what was needed. (The party found a small, corroded statue of Lisopheth, the goddess of fresh water, in an alcove in this room.) While the way up near (G) and (H) was blocked by dirt and limbs, water and a breeze were clearly leaking through, indicating that this passageway probably lead outside to the top of the cliff at one time.

East of the refectory was a spiral staircase leading down; another ramp leading up into darkness; and a pair of rooms (I) and (J) which had apparently once been dormitories. Lambert and Garm estimated that, judging by the space and scattered remnants of simple bedframes, there were probably no more than a dozen monks in this space at any given time. A definite stink filled this space, and Aster discovered a small iron dagger with a bird’s beak as its pommel next to a variety of unrecognizable bones and a few large, black feathers. The three giant rats in (J) explained the stink and remnants. Once again, the party dealt with the problem rather cleverly: Garm and Lambert marched rather noisily around to the west side of (J), drawing their attention so Aster could sneak up on the rats and dispatch them from the northern entrance to the room. It worked so well that after the first two rats were down, I stopped combat, narrating the third rat’s demise rather than wasting time rolling. A search afterwards turned up a small box of unrecognizable and likely ancient gold coins stuffed into a crack in the wall.

At this point, we wrapped up the session, and it turned out everyone had rather conveniently just hit level 2. (No, I didn’t actually plan that—it was providential.) The players decided their characters would take a short rest in the hallway north of (I), to get away from the fetid stench of the giant rats’ nest. A few Hit Dice were spent to heal up, and in between sessions everyone did the minimal book-keeping required to level up in 5th Edition.

After their rest, the party decided to go down the spiral staircase to the east. I hadn’t mapped this part of the dungeon, partly because I wanted the players’ imaginations to fill in, partly because there wasn’t going to be any combat down here, and—well, partly because I’d run out of time prepping for the session. A flooded hallway with flickering white light shining through the semi-salt water confronted the party. Garm took some of Aster’s rope, a piton, and his club and dove in, using the weight of his chainmail to walk as far as he could before having to turn around and return for air. He’d just about reached his limit—a very impressive thirty feet underwater in heavy armor—when he felt steps and was able to climb up into surprisingly fresh air beyond. After tacking down the rope, the other two could cross more easily, and everyone made it through that obstacle unscathed.

The light turned out to be coming from a continual flame spell over a large arched doorway; but of more immediate interest to a party of treasure-hunting PCs was the storeroom next to them. This turned out to contain an old stone chest filled with copper, gold, silver, a magical gem, an obviously magical cloak, and a magical rod of some sort. (More on these later.)

The larger chamber, oddly enough, contained nothing but a large pool of fresh water filled by a spring flowing from a crack in the wall. The party was just about to leave when a naiad (a water fey, rather like a dryad) rose up from the pool. She answered a few questions—most notably, she confirmed that this had been a monastery for worshipers of powerful fey, whom she also served and who had bound her to this pool a very long time before. (Turns out fey aren’t good at keeping time, especially when they can’t see the sun, moon or stars.) She confirmed that the flooded hallway would drain over the next day or so, and agreed to let the colonists draw water from her pool on three conditions: First, that the colonists did not defile or dirty her pool; second, that the party deal with the trapped spirit of a monk trapped in undeath within the monastery; and third, that in a year and a day the three party members would return to perform a service for the naiad. This last was a bit worrisome—no one clever likes to owe a fey creature favors or services—but given how desperately the colony needed fresh water, the party agreed.

Back upstairs, the party carefully approached the final room of the monastery, which turned out to be the abbot’s quarters. This too wasn’t mapped, because I’d (again) not had time, but also because leaving it a bit vague made this part rather creepier. The room turned out to have a private chapel of sorts attached to it, and the skeletal remains of the abbot were still on the floor there, where he’d clearly met some sort of violent end. After that discovery, the shadow I’d had lurking in the room, making furtive movements, finally attacked. Unfortunately, its attacks were pretty much ineffective—I just couldn’t roll well, Lambert had just acquired his turn undead class feature after leveling up, and everyone else cleverly used their lights to keep track of the shadow and prevent it from hiding. It only managed one successful attack on Garm before being defeated.

That pretty much wrapped things up—the monastery had been explored, treasure had been found, and an inconvenient but inexhaustible supply of fresh water had been acquired for the colony. The naiad’s spring won’t serve the colony forever, but it definitely solves a major, immediate need. The party also got to keep most of their treasure—taxation is an interesting little wrinkle I threw into this game, and something I’ll have to talk about soon—and the magic items turned out to be an elemental gem of water (which summons a water elemental when smashed), a cloak of the manta ray (which lets its wearer swim easily and breathe underwater), and an immovable rod (a classic D&D item, and one with an infinite variety of uses for a clever group of PCs.) All in all, not bad for two sessions of work!

GM’s Notes

My roleplaying career started with D&D Third Edition, and the wacky old dungeons of earlier editions had been relegated to history by that time. The D&D CRPGs I played before I ever picked up dice—Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Planescape: Torment—hinted at those just a little bit, but they mostly presented dungeons which fit well into the setting and whose construction mostly made sense. No truly weird features, like White Plume Mountain’s hovering river, no Tomb of Horrors‘s demon mouth of annihilation, nor Undermountain’s … everything. As a result, I’ve always believed a “good” dungeon should have a clear purpose and a sensible history in within its setting, and that fantastic features likewise need to suit the setting and need to exist for reasons which made good sense to their creators. Certainly this ancient, ruined monastery fits that mold; it had an ecosystem of sorts, and its history mattered a great deal (and will hopefully continue to matter going forward.)

On a personal note, I managed to spend minimal time on these maps, and that’s great. I’ve mentioned on the podcast before that my Eberron game failed in part because I spent so much time making pretty maps in MapTool, with all sorts of layers and dynamic lighting and visibility and pretty special effects, that the plot never developed. That didn’t happen this time—hallelujah!—and the game was much improved for it.

I don’t have much else to say about this dungeon crawl, in part because dungeon crawls are sort of their own reward. A good dungeon serves the same purpose as any other location in a RPG—they’re places where the game’s story is developed both procedurally and dramatically. What makes a dungeon crawl special is the challenges—done right, they’re a series of puzzles, whether those be combat-related or not. These encounters were mostly combats, but I hope to change that in the future. (I do tend to struggle with non-combat encounters a bit.)

We likely won’t be doing too many dungeon crawls in this game. There’s too much overworld exploration, colonial social development, and external diplomacy (hint hint!) to do in this game for that. But there will be a few more, and while I’ve got plenty of room to improve, I think I’ve set the bar reasonably high for those future dungeons.

(Well, okay, just one quick ado. A word from Grant on stats: We rolled stats since that “felt more like D&D”, using the “4d6, drop lowest” method. Since I don’t mind characters actually being competent, if anyone had two stats less than 10 to start with, I let them re-roll one of those bad stats once more. Dealing with one “bad” stat is a fun little challenge, and it can give a D&D character something unique to remember them by. Dealing with more than that just gets frustrating.)

Lambert

Lambert is my PC. He’s a Neutral Good cleric of a benevolent nature goddess, and he’s part of a clerical order called the Oaken Scales (as in “scales of justice”) that exists to cultivate mutually-beneficial harmony between civilization and the natural world. I made him with the Hermit background and the Nature cleric domain. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve played a lot of kind of hard-edged, zealous, avenging divine magic users before, and Lambert represents a conscious effort to move away from that. While he is both capable of violence and reasonably skilled at it, he is better described as a peaceful person who knows how to fight than as a warrior. He is empathetic, measured in his speech, kindhearted, friendly, and helpful. When I was rolling his stats up, I wound up with a single 8 which I put into Dexterity, explaining it in-character as some nerve damage from an old accidental injury. He has the worst stats of anyone in the party (though with a 16 in strength and a 17 in Wisdom, he’s still no slouch!), but that’s handily compensated for by the fact that he’s a primary spellcaster. He joined the colony as both a spiritual guide and because as a member of his order, he knows about wilderness survival, agriculture, herbalism, and medicine, which makes him a very useful person to have around when you’re months of ocean sailing away from your homeland. He compensates for his low DEX with a shield and some chain mail and fights with a warhammer (though I’m hoping to change that out for a sword soon).

Asterales (Aster)

Aster is Grant’s wife’s PC, and she is an interesting and well-developed twist on the “street rat rogue” archetype. The illegitimate child of a barmaid and a wealthy, influential elf in the old world, she was basically left to her own devices growing up and as a result, she is tough. (She was built with the Urchin background.) She’s also fortunate to have 18s in both Dexterity and Intelligence, which makes her exceedingly good at roguey things. Her backstory is already having some effects on the campaign; our last player’s PC is her bodyguard (but more about him in his own entry). For my money, at least, one of Aster’s most interesting traits is the particular spin she’s put on the Chaotic Neutral alignment. She will steal, but not out of simple greed or for the fun of it – her ethics are best described as “who needs it more?” She’ll steal things if she perceives herself as needing them more than whoever is in possession of them currently. This particular outlook makes her both more useful in a party and more interesting than the standard “chaotic neutral rogue.” She has a bit of an independent streak and isn’t used to working as part of a team yet (though she’s taking to it very quickly.) In play, she is proving to be a shrewd tactician, a very capable scout, and an absolutely lethal threat to anything she can flank or get the drop on. She fights with a bow and a short sword, and has a few daggers and a whip for when the situation calls for them.

Garm

The other full human in the party. Garm’s player decided he wanted a challenge in character creation, and set out to turn the “generic fighter” archetype into something more engaging. A Chaotic Neutral fighter with an 18 Strength and the Entertainer background, Garm is a recently-freed slave gladiator who was sold into the pits at such a young age he has no memories predating his life as a guy who kills for the entertainment of others. Such a background has made for many a brooding, gloomy PC over the many years of tabletop RPGs, but Garm’s player has taken an entirely different tack. One of Garm’s defining characteristics is his whole “I’m really new to this” attitude. He’s never been free. He’s never been part of a society. He’s never had actual friends or people depending on him, but ever since Aster’s father purchased him as a bodyguard for his daughter as he shipped her off to the new world (where she can’t embarrass him) he’s been actively learning how the real world works. The other thing that makes Garm work as a character is that he’s smart. His Intelligence is right behind his strength, statistically-speaking, and he is a quick (and dramatic!) problem solver. This is the guy who, in the very first fight of the entire campaign, ripped a shark off his own leg and attempted to beat a sahuagin with it! When he’s not bludgeoning enemies with live aquatic predators, he uses a greataxe in combat.

And that’s the party! They’ve proven to be fun and effective so far, and the relational dynamics are already starting to develop. It’ll be fun to see how this goes.

I’m not going to give a rundown of the characters in this session, except a very basic race-and-class. I’ll save character writeups for another time, because they deserve a post all their own.

Recap

I started things off with a bit of narration to set the scene: A colony ship laden with people and goods, about fifteen weeks at sea. It’s en route to a distant archipelago believed to be rich in land, goods, and magic—the last being a rare thing indeed in the “old world”. Unfortunately, this vessel (which I still need to name!) has been separated from its sister ship, and has been driven before a hurricane for several days. It’s just run aground, and the morning light and clearing weather shows that its hull is badly damaged, and that the storm surge and winds have grounded the ship on a low barrier island.

After deliberation and a little scouting, the settlement’s governor and captain decide to unload the ship and, using her longboats and manpower, move to the “mainland” across the lagoon created by the barrier island. There’s a series of sandbars that protect the space between the barrier island and the larger landmass beyond—shallow enough that a man could walk across it in water up to his chest, and with several places only ankle-deep (at least, at low tide.)

I’m leaving out a lot of detail, of course, but that should be enough to set the scene. Enough talk—time for action!

The PCs are hauling goods across this line of sandbars and shallows—unarmored, though they each had a weapon on them just in case—when a reef shark latches onto the fighter’s leg and a pair of spear-wielding sahuagin rise up from the waters in front of them. They aren’t alone—I described screams and shouts erupting all along the line of laboring colonists—but these three were the PCs’ encounter.

Naturally, the players immediately surprised me. Their characters had no idea what these sahuagin were (none being found in the waters off their homelands), so my wife’s half-elf rogue (“Aster”) immediately makes a Persuasion check to wordlessly convince the sahuagin they’re no threat, and they can be friends! She rolls an 18, which is actually quite good. This gives one of the sahuagin pause, and it doesn’t attack as it considers what Aster’s lowered dagger and extended other hand mean. Unfortunately, the other one snarls and throws its spear at her, rejecting her peaceful overture. It hits, dropping Aster to about half HP. (First-level characters are pretty lacking in hit points!) The human nature cleric (“Lambert”, played by Peter) is not fond of this turn of events, and casts a cantrip spell to pull the attacking sahuagin towards him and deal a bit of damage. That puts the sahuagin between Aster and Lambert.

And it’s at that moment I’m reminded why I love playing with this particular group—aside from being married to one and podcasting buddies with another.

The human fighter (“Garm”) reaches down, grabs the shark, rips it off his leg and out of the water … and attempts to hit the sahuagin with it. And this partially works! I ask for a Strength check to grab the shark (basically a grapple), and he succeeds. I then decide that because the shark is writhing around, Garm’s definitely attacking with disadvantage. That results in a missed attack roll, but attempting to beat a sahuagin with its own reef shark ends up being the definitive highlight of the whole night. This should probably have been two separate actions over two rounds, but I was caught up in the action and the moment turned out to be well worth it. (Garm’s player mentioned after the game that “sure, you can try to hit him with the shark” was the best moment of his entire gaming career. That’s the power of saying ‘yes’.)

Note that in the first combat round of the campaign, two of the three players have used something other than an attack roll, and neutralized two of their three opponents for at least a round. Back at the top of the initative chart, the shark fails his own Strength check to escape the hold. It’s still up in the air, which is not typically where sharks are found.

Aster attacks the sahuagin Lambert dragged towards them earlier—and crits! Because she’s flanking her target, that means sneak attack damage—and in 5th Edition, sneak attack dice are doubled along with damage dice on a crit. This sahuagin was at 17 HP after Lambert’s spell, and she does 20 points of damage, wrecking it with a nasty backstab. Quite a lot of cheering ensues on the Google Hangout!

At this point, the remaining sahuagin assesses the situation (in part because it’s his turn.) He’s seen the tiny half-elf lady try to make a peaceful overture to him, and when that was rejected she drove a dagger through his hunting partner’s spine. The big guy is currently menacing him with the very shark they’d gone hunting with. The third is clearly a spellcaster of some sort. All in all, this has not been a good hunt. He turns tail and runs—or swims, anyway—blowing a call to retreat on a conch shell horn. All along the line of colonists, cheers go up as the other sahuagin and sharks flee. Garm tossed the still-struggling reef shark onto a nearby sandbar, where it was unceremoniously brained for its efforts.

Lambert tends to the wounded colonists and the other PCs, and unloading resumes, although much more slowly and under guard from archers in the ship’s longboats. A scout reports that there’s a crumbling, if imposing, ruin just around the bend, built into the tall cliff faces rising up just a little bit inland. The colony’s governor decides to set up the first night’s camp there; there’s a sort of portico in front of what seems like an ancient temple or shrine, and the raised vantage point is more defensible than an open beach. However, he asks the party members to rest up (and eat their fill of broiled reef shark!) because he’s got a special task for them: Exploring the ruin and making sure there aren’t any more surprises waiting for them inside.

Trust me—there will be. I’ve got two pages of graph paper already filled with a map…

GM’s Notes

All in all, I was very happy with how this first session went down. We only actually played for about an hour and a half, but I feel like we got a good bit accomplished for the start of a new game and new system. Combat was very quick—twenty minutes if you include all the time looking up combat rules for the first time. That was a huge help. As a GM, I rarely end a game thinking it went well—I’m often quite harsh on myself—and I couldn’t help but be pleased at the end of the evening.

I do want to break that combat encounter down a bit. By the book, two sahuagin and a reef shark are a very dangerous encounter for a first-level party. That’s a 450 XP encounter: Three CR 1/2 monsters, which are normally 100 XP each, and a multiplier for a combat with multiple creatures since that’s more actions for the PCs to defend against. A hard encounter for three first-level PCs is budgeted at 225 XP, and 300 XP is a deadly encounter! A lethal encounter as the very first combat is, according to all conventional GMing wisdom, a terrible idea.

However, I had several features in place to mitigate the difficulty of the combat while still making sure the players felt they’d earned a significant victory. While the PCs started at a bit of a disadvantage—their tanky PCs weren’t armored—they could quickly move into water too shallow for the reef shark. That gave them the opportunity to “beat” the shark just through movement actions. The sahuagin were also going to throw their spears, which reduced their damage somewhat after their first attack. Most importantly, they were cowards. I kept track not only of the damage done to each individual monster, but to the whole group of monsters. When the total amount of damage done to the monsters was half their total HP or more, they would decide their “easy prey” wasn’t worth the trouble, and flee. Since these monsters have 22 HP each, that meant they’d flee when the party did 33 damage. I also counted anything creative as damage; the rogue’s Persuasion check not only ‘stunned’ one sahuagin for a round, it also did half that sahuagin’s hit points in damage. (Fun fact: You don’t have to describe all hit point loss as physical damage.) The fight looked dangerous, and it certainly could have been if it had gone longer, but everything was set up to make sure it wouldn’t go that long. It worked out quite well, too—the last sahuagin was clearly at a disadvantage at the time he decided to flee.

I do want to talk more about that Persuasion check. My first instinct was to say “no, that doesn’t do anything.” After all, these are vicious creatures, and I definitely didn’t want these sahuagin (who make great low-level coastal villains) befriended! For the first time in my gaming career, however, I consciously applied the “yes-and” rule when GMing. The player had done something creative and interesting; my job was to make that work within my plan, not reject it as contrary to how I’d planned the game to go. I had to think about it for a moment, but having the Persuasion check effectively ‘stun’ one of the opponents worked out very well. It rewarded that player for being creative in a combat encounter—and in fact for trying to not have the fight at all, which is one of those things we’ve constantly talked about on this show!—without drastically changing the story.

Finally, that wonderful shark moment. This was another “yes-and” moment, and I had to think about that one too. In this case, the character’s mechanical attributes swayed me towards saying ‘yes’—Garm has the “Tavern Brawler” feat, which makes him exceptionally good with improvised weapons. That was reason enough to get out of the way and let that player be cool; and even though it didn’t work—probably due to the mechanical penalty I imposed, which everyone agreed was completely reasonable—it was an awesome moment that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

So yeah—after one session, I’m feeling really good about this game. I have a lot of prep work to do still: None of the NPCs have names yet, and I need to think beyond the upcoming dungeon crawl and determine what else is going to happen in the first arc of this campaign. But I’m extremely happy with how things have gone so far, and how promising the game is!

There’s a reason why D&D and its progeny such as Pathfinder, 13th Age and the entire OSR movement continue to have staying power – the basic gameplay feedback loop of dungeon crawling, fantasy (whatever its level), and leveling up is so much fun that it’s spawned entire genres of digital representations. Everything from roguelikes, to various types of traditional cRPG, to Diablo and the Dark Souls games have their roots in various flavors of D&D. There’s a lot of fun and excitement to be gained from battling monsters and collecting treasure.

But there’s also something else that’s cool about this type of game: Character creation is front-loaded. Because you pick a class (or two) and then follow it from there, the possibility exists to define more about who your PC is and who they will become in a D&D style game than in something more open-ended like GURPS or Savage Worlds. A class gives you a predefined role to play and as such, it gives you a lot of room to think about how you’ll go about coloring that particular archetype in the campaign. And because of that, I’ve been sitting here entertaining a number of possibilities.

I’ve been thinking about a tiefling paladin/rogue that’s basically an investigator and advocate for the religion he serves and looks like Judge Frolo but acts much more like the bishop in Les Miserables. I’ve been thinking about a wizard, ranger, or wizard/ranger that’s basically the benevolent hermit that lives in the woods and keeps an eye out for the safety of the town(s) he lives near. I’ve been thinking about a wizened, kindly old Celtic-style druid, about a tough old man-at-arms (fighter) who will train the colonists in how to keep bandits and wild beasts at bay with spear and palisade, about the cleric of a sea god on the ship as a hedge against the dangers of the long voyage, and that was just TODAY. (Grant floated the D&D idea on Saturday evening when we wrapped up our Rogue Trader micro-campaign.)

The classics are classics for a reason. Gygax and Arneson definitely managed to bottle lightning when they made D&D, and while it has benefitted from refinement over the years, it’s telling that most of the successful refinements have been ways to make it more like itself. I love all kinds of different RPGs, but I never want to reach the point where I sneer at D&D and turn my nose up at it. Much like cheesecake, I don’t want nothing BUT it all the time, but if I never got a chance to have it again, I would definitely be sad.